Regulating the Private Buses of “Google-land”

Before the buses became a symbol for San Francisco’s gentrification woes, they were just a fleet of several hundred private coaches that whisked some seventeen thousand workers around San Francisco and to and from the Silicon Valley campuses of such companies as Apple, Google, and Genentech. In climate-controlled shuttles, with tinted windows and outfitted with Wi-Fi, employees started their workdays upon boarding, opening their laptops.

San Francisco is deep into a second tech boom—and, with it, many less affluent workers are getting priced out of the city. For them, the buses represent the threat posed by highly paid technology employees. (This month, Google started running its own catamaran, named the Triumphant, which departs from a San Francisco pier.)

Last February, Rebecca Solnit wrote, in the London Review of Books, that the buses had become “the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.” From there, the backlash against them snowballed. At one anti-gentrification protest, people beat a bus-shaped piñata. On other occasions, activists formed rings around Google and Apple buses to prevent them from moving, as members of a previous generation might have done with a redwood. A local contest to decorate a Genentech bus with art elicited mocking entries of Trojan Horses, cattle cars, and Craigslist listings for overpriced apartments. At a protest in Oakland, in December, someone allegedly broke a bus window (this according to a Google employee, who tweeted it, of course).

After years of complaints of the lumbering shuttles hogging San Francisco’s cramped streets—occasionally blocking public buses from making stops, double parking, or encroaching on bike lanes—the board of directors of the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency voted unanimously on Tuesday to begin regulating them. The eighteen-month-long pilot program, slated to begin in July, will require that the shuttle buses be registered and that they make stops only at two hundred designated public bus stops. Companies will pay a dollar each time one of their buses uses a stop, which would add up to a hundred thousand dollars a year for each of the big companies, the agency estimates.

City leaders say that state law requires them to charge only enough to recover the fees required to administer the program. Yet the amount wasn’t enough for the dozens of detractors who lined up to speak at the agency’s meeting on Tuesday, at City Hall. Speakers called the buses “conquistador transportation,” and derided the transit agency for allowing “tech barons” to get away with paying such a low fee to use the city infrastructure—a dollar less than the current commuter fare on public buses—when their shuttles had been idling at the bus stops illegally for years.

Herbert Weiner, who is seventy-four, and who later told me that he had taken the bus from the outer reaches of the city to get to the meeting, suggested that the companies should “pay a handsome fee to the city.”

“They are getting away with murder to invade the neighborhood,” he told the board. “Maybe we should call San Francisco Google-land.”

“We need to stop demonizing these tech workers who are simply trying to get to work,” Scott Wiener, a city supervisor, said. Representatives of the transit companies that run the tech shuttles showed up, too. “We want to do the right thing,” Mike Albertolle, a fleet manager for Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation, said. “We want to be respected. Whatever it takes, we’ll do to do the job you want us to do. You have to give us a chance.”

A Google program manager named Crystal Sholts said that, contrary to the idea that all tech workers are rich élitists, she is still paying off student loans. (The Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch published talking points that Google had apparently e-mailed to its employees: “We thought you might appreciate some guidance on what to say. Feel free to add your own style and opinion.”)

Despite the dissent from many who spoke at the meeting, the board passed the pilot program with little debate. One board member, Joél Ramos, said that San Francisco’s lack of affordable housing is the root cause of the shuttle-bus rancor, arguing that a bus is just a bus.

“We’ve never been able to afford property here,” Ramos said. “I’ve been living the ramifications of the extreme high cost of this city way before the buses got here, and it will continue to happen until we get the affordable housing we need.”

The shuttle defenders have at least one thing going for them: the green argument. While most of the buses run on diesel fuel, a study by the Municipal Transportation Agency found that half the shuttle commuters said they would drive alone in their cars if the buses weren’t an option. The study highlighted the number of car trips, and the corresponding amount of emissions, saved.

Yet housing activists—a potent lobby in a city where more than sixty per cent of the population are renters—argue that the tech industry is not paying its fair share for displacing other residents. Some say that the carbon footprint from the additional traffic from people who have moved out of, but still work in, the city, and now commute by car, must be taken into account as well.

Then, there’s the issue of fairness. “If you and I park in front of a bus stop, and you’re there long enough, you’re going to get a ticket that’s more than a dollar,” David Campos, a city supervisor, told a group of merchants in his district last week.

After the pilot project passed on Tuesday, with the dollar fee intact, a few young bus opponents complained about the quick vote as they headed down the City Hall steps. “It was a charade,” one of them said. They had been buoyed by the protest during the morning commute, they said, which had successfully detained two commuter buses near Twitter’s headquarters, in downtown San Francisco—with the pictures to prove it circulating on Twitter. They recalled the scene: